Rapinoe's Roster

Rapinoe's Roster Hero
Rapinoe's Roster Pitch & Players

Inspiration

As someone who has been a fan of women's soccer, there aren't many avenues to keep up with the teams, the games, and the every day news updates with the players. Popular sports notification apps like The Score have expansive networks for every men's soccer league down to the 7th tier but they do not include any women's soccer whatsoever. I want to stay updated with the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) and am sure other soccer fans in the community want to as well.

What does it do

I created a web application where the user can create their own Fantasy National Women's Soccer League. They have their choice of 2 goalkeepers, 4 defenders, 4 midfielders, 3 forwards, and 2 free selections. As the future matchdays of the NWSL begin, users will be able to stay up to date with the latest media, track when their favorite teams are playing, and see how their own selected starting eleven perform week after week.

How I built it

I built this application using React with help from the local development server, Vite. To obtain data for the dynamic front end, I created a Python script to help me clean up data from the 2 APIs I used and assist in the population of multiple json data files.

Challenges I ran into

APIs Lacking Data Consistency

There are barely any APIs that collect and update data specific to women's soccer. Not only has this become increasingly difficult when trying to source all the needed data for player, team, and season information, it's led to a lot of features being dedicated to the backlog until further refinement. In addition, the APIs I was able to find also lack data consistency in the form of missing fields.

React

As someone who is currently enrolled at RIT as a Computer Science major, I have not had the privilege to learn React in an academic setting. Despite that, I enjoyed diving into this platform head first and am very proud of what I was able to achieve. I'm on my way to Full Stack Development Alley and they already know my name.

CSS

:sob:

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am extremely proud that I was able to make use of the free data I collected from the American Soccer Analysis API and APIFootball API. Though they were both vastly different in terms of the data included and structure, the overall data helped me identify key components that I should keep in mind for future features.

The concerns are separated!

I have been wanting to make a soccer-related project for some time now and I'm excited to see this one come to fruition and can't wait to keep on improving.

What I learned

Contrary to popular belief: I LOVE CSS! Though getting all my elements to the position where I wanted them proved to be difficult, I could not be more proud of this result given my CSS framework-less project. I shocked myself at styling all of these components from scratch and loved the final look through and through.

I also learned that passion goes a long way. Coming into this weekend, I was sure that I was going to do a project focused on women's soccer whether that be a game, website, or data visualization. I'm happy that I could incorporate all of those into this project.

What's next for Rapinoe's Roster

Make the magic happen!

I would like to make an accessible, meaningful, consistent, and reliable NWSL Soccer API that can be used to develop apps for those who wish to be more digitally involved in supporting and seeing the growth of the NWSL.

Reagan's Rush!

There is no reason why my interest in women's sport should die down now. With the success of the Professional Women's Soccer League during these first few months of 2024, there is no doubt that fans and hobby sports analysts all over the world are itching for reliable data to work with.